Atrial and Brain Natriuretic Peptides- Benefits and Limits of their use in Cardiovascular Diseases.

Natriuretic peptides, produced by cardiac myocytes, are regulators of the intravascular volume and blood pressure, and also exhibit neuroendocrine, metabolic and growth controlling effects. In heart failure, their synthesis increases exponentially as part of the neuroendocrine activation, but their beneficial effects are diminished. The paper reviews relevant data about their role as diagnosis and prognosis markers in heart failure, the hemodynamic and clinical benefits of their use as therapy in heart failure, together with the main adverse effects.

A cause of falsely high noise level in signal averaged electrocardiogram recordings.

Signal averaged electrocardiogram (SAECG) is a well-established noninvasive method of exploration in patients at risk for sudden cardiac death. The time-domain SAECG analysis has a set of well-defined standards, including the value of accepted noise level. In very rare instances, the final noise level appears to remain unacceptably high even after carefully preparing the skin of the patient and averaging a great number of QRS complexes.